Teaching Artist Fellowship
Programme Overview
The Teaching Artist Fellowship is a structured five-month residency based in Art Studio, Manarat Al Saadiyat. The Fellowship is designed for artists who value community engagement within their artistic practice and are interested in honing their teaching skills. The programme offers three teaching artists the opportunity to set up their studio within a vibrant learning environment, while developing their creative and teaching practice through chosen areas of research.
Selected fellows participate in professional development seminars delivered by leading regional and international partners and are provided training on designing meaningful learning experiences while learning how to effectively communicate their practice to various audiences.
At the end of the fellowship, artists can expect to build effective communication skills, facilitation experience as well as a robust teaching portfolio.
Meet the Fellows
Hana El-Sagini
Hana El-Sagini works with different mediums to reflect on her personal journey and surroundings, exploring themes of memory, trauma, and loss through glorifying everyday stories, spaces, and objects. After a 12-year stellar corporate career, El-Sagini became a full-time artist in 2015. Materiality and scale are important aspects she uses to create dialogues of opposites and tension within the work. The space where the work exists and the bodies surrounding the work are elements she engages with, aiming to add a question of significance in relationship to the human body, to add another layer to the work and to leave a memory for the spectator beyond listening and seeing.
She attended the Metafora Academy of Contemporary Art in Barcelona, and then in 2022, she completed her Masters in Fine Art at the Academy of Art and Design FHNW in Basel, Switzerland. In 2018, she won The Dean Collection Award, and in 2022 she was selected to be part of “Campus Art Dubai x Public Art” group. The same year, 421 Art Campus in Abu Dhabi selected her for the Artistic Development Program, where she held her solo show “Counting Fingers”. El-Sagini held several solo shows between Cairo and the UAE, in addition to group exhibitions across the Middle East and Europe. The artist has an installation acquired for the Fenix Museum in Rotterdam’s permanent collection. El-Sagini currently teaches at Zayed University, Dubai, where she lives and works.
Lama Altakruri
Lama Altakruri is a visual artist who explores the psychological states evoked by globalized spaces of professional hospitality (e.g., hotels, cafes, etc.) within neoliberal contexts. Through a wide range of media, she investigates the sense of familiarity in such spaces due to the homogenization processes of global capitalism, and the evoked paradoxical feelings of anxiety, comfort, loneliness, dissociation, and detachment. Additionally, she examines the significance of these spaces as a tool to reinforce a socio-economic status within a global middle class.
Altakruri holds an MFA in Art Theory and Practice from Northwestern University, USA (2017), and a BA in Contemporary Visual Art from the International Art Academy, Palestine (2015). She participated in artist residencies at Alserkal Avenue Residency in Dubai, UAE (2018); Gästeatelier Krone in Aarau, Switzerland (2020); and the Intimacy in the Apocalyptic Phase Residency at Dar Jacir in Bethlehem, Palestine (2022).
Her work has been exhibited in various venues worldwide, including Forum Schlossplatz, Switzerland; TAC, Eindhoven, Netherlands; Alserkal Avenue, Dubai, UAE; and the Mary & Leigh Block Museum of Art, Evanston, USA.
Richi Bhatia
Richi Bhatia received her M.F.A. in Painting from M. S University, Vadodara (2015) and a P.G. Diploma in Curatorial Studies from Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Mumbai (2018).
Bhatia’s artistic practice is a multidisciplinary exploration of both body and medium, spanning drawing, performance, object making, assemblages, and food interventions. She enjoys the process of walking and creating by hand, often engaging in long, labour-intensive work, as well as delving into text, research, and the collection of knowledge in various formats. Her work addresses the social fabric we inhabit as humans, using the body as a pressure indicator—an ever-sensing tool that responds to memory, food, technology, and the environment.
Bhatia recently presented Felling Flesh, a lecture performance at New York University Abu Dhabi for The Body Archive class with May Al-Dabbagh’s (2024) and participated in Sustaina India’s inaugural exhibition Ears to the Ground, Heart to the Horizon at Bikaner House, New Delhi (2024). She also took part in Spatial Poem No. 5 at Japan Society Gallery, New York (2023) and curated Suno, an exhibition featuring 22 artists from the Global South and its diaspora at 1X1 Art Gallery, Dubai (2023). Bhatia has held residencies and participated in programs at the Alserkal Arts Foundation, Dubai (2023), Ladakh Arts and Media Organisation, Leh, India (2022), and Harvard University’s South Asia Institute (2020), among others. She is also involved in Separations Geography, an ongoing project by Daak Vaak (India) and Mandarjazail (Pakistan).
Mentors & Faculty
Professional Development Seminars by Focus 5
Focus 5 provides high-quality, professional learning opportunities and program consulting focused on aligning arts integration, best instructional practices, and current thinking in the field of arts and education. We collaborate and consult with teachers, teaching artists, schools, school districts, arts organizations, arts commissions, arts councils, and museums around the country. We are in classrooms on a daily basis to keep our work refined, relevant, and effective in the ever-growing and evolving field of arts integration and education.
Peer Mentorship by Cristiana de Marchi
Based on the principles of Artistic Research, Cristiana de Marchi will work with the fellows to generate new knowledge through rigorous and creative investigation of artistic practice. Through a series of structured group and individual mentorship sessions, the fellows will be introduced to techniques designed to critically deepen their lines of action, pushing the boundaries of artistic practice and fostering alternative perspectives on artistic works and processes.
Cristiana de Marchi is a visual artist and writer based in Dubai. She received her MFA with honours in Archaeology from The University of Turin, Italy and is currently a PhD candidate in the Artistic Research Programme at the University of applied Arts, Vienna.
An artist, curator and writer, she has lectured widely on art and, in addition to publishing articles and essays in catalogues and magazines devoted to contemporary art, she conducts personal artistic and literary research. Cristiana works with video and textiles as her privileged medium to explore issues related to identity, displacement, belonging and the porous borders that separate regions, while allowing contact.
Her work has been featured in the Textile Biennale (2023), Yinchuan Biennale (2016), Santa Cruz Biennale (2016), Biennale Donna (2021), Culture of Peace Biennial (2016), and in parallel events to the Singapore Biennial (2013) and to the Istanbul Biennale (2022). Among many other museums and institutions, her work has been presented at the Louvre Abu Dhabi (UAE), Mathaf, Museum of Modern Art (Qatar), Villa Romana (Italy), Sursock Museum (Lebanon), Langgeng Art Foundation (Indonesia), The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art (USA), Villa Vassilieff (France), Sharjah Art Museum and Maraya Art Centre (both UAE).
Vernaculars Seminar by Murtaza Vali
‘Vernaculars’, a programme conceived and led by curator Murtaza Valli, will explore strategies through which artistic and curatorial practices can negotiate and reconcile the often oppositional vectors that define the field of contemporary art production in the 21st century: the local and the global. Consisting of group discussions, participant presentations, guest lectures and studio visits, the program will be split into three distinct two-session modules, each focused on a methodology that holds particular relevance for current cultural production in the UAE and across the broader Gulf: craft, mythology and folklore, and infrastructure. Guided by collective readings and analysis of artworks and exhibitions, the workshop will reflect on these methodologies as tools for both making and unmaking specific places and worlds, for cultivating opacities in the face of the globalized artworld’s demands for legibility, and for grounding the universalizing discourses of contemporary art within the specific vernaculars—the familiar rhythms, cadences, sights, smells, tastes, feels, poetics and politics—of the Khaleeji everyday.
Murtaza Vali is a critic, curator, and art historian based in Sharjah and Brooklyn. His ongoing research interests include contemporary art around the Indian Ocean littoral; materialist art histories; ex-centric minimalisms; the weight of color; and ghosts and other figures of liminal subjectivities and repressed histories. A recipient of a 2011 Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for Short-Form Writing, he publishes regularly in art periodicals and exhibition catalogues for non-profit institutions and commercial galleries. Vali is an Adjunct Curator at the Jameel Arts Centre in Dubai, where he organized the widely-acclaimed group exhibitions Crude (2018-19), which explored the relationship between oil and modernity across West Asia and North Africa, and Guest Relations (with Lucas Morin) (2023-24), a sequel exhibition examining hotels and the hospitality industry across the Global South. He is also the curator of Proposals for a Memorial to Partition, an itinerant research and curatorial platform investigating the lingering trauma and legacy of partitions in South Asia and beyond. First appearing in Manual for Treason, a publication commissioned for Sharjah Biennial 10 (2011), subsequent iterations of this project have been presented at the Jameel Arts Centre (2022-23) and Twelve Gates Arts, Philadelphia (2023).